Friday, June 26, 2015

Lieutenant Commander Kyle West is
one of Earth Fleet’s greatest fighter pilots. Every day, he leads his squadron
into battle over Earth’s cities in a seemingly endless war against a vicious
alien race, defending his home and his loved ones.

Millions of miles away, the Fleet’s
Elite Squadron attacks from another angle, engaging the enemy on its home turf.
Casualties are high, and the Squadron needs more of the Fleet’s very best. But
joining the Elite is a death sentence—a surety Kyle isn’t willing to face.
Until a devastating attack wipes out the family he refused to leave.

Commander Andrei Dezhnyov, an Elite
Squadron gunner, isn’t sure what to make of the cocky new American pilot. Kyle
is equally uncertain about the snarly Russian, but as they warm up to each
other, their tentative alliance becomes a deep bond—one that endangers them
both when a daring and disobedient rescue reveals secrets that call into
question everything they’ve ever believed about their enemy. Secrets that their
superiors would kill to protect.

(Kyle & Emily flying their fighter to the
alien planet with their squadron for the first time…)

Though
coming to Epsilon had been on the bitter end of bittersweet, Kyle still got a
charge out of launching off the flight deck for the first time.

The
station’s flight deck was a long tunnel extending through the core of Epsilon,
open on both ends. Its runway surface had been designed to look a lot like the
old-time aircraft carriers from back in the days when wars happened on oceans
instead of in the stratosphere. Catapults that had once thrust fighter jets
into the air now flung the modern-day fighters toward the Menarian atmosphere,
thus preserving fuel for combat maneuvers and the return to Epsilon at the end
of the mission.

The catapult
shot them out into space, sending them straight toward Menar.

After a full
month—not to mention the three weeks in stasis—away from a real cockpit, he’d
been dying to feel this again, and it brought a grin to his face as he
white-knuckled the control stick.

“You love
that, don’t you?” Emily teased.

“Like sex after
a dry spell.”

“Honey, if
sex feels like this to you, I think you’re doing it wrong.”

“If it
doesn’t feel like this to you, I think you’re doing it wrong.”

She just
laughed.

Kyle stared
straight ahead at the planet coming toward them. Something so huge didn’t
appear to move much, if at all—just as the ground didn’t seem to move very fast
beneath a high-flying fighter back on Earth—but the thrill remained. The
exhilaration, the fear, the sheer knowledge he was minutes away from being
inside the shell of roiling black clouds that shrouded the entire planet. The
planet he was hell-bent on destroying, one structure and one scaly bastard at a
time if he had to.

They dropped
into the thick black clouds, and their visibility was nil. Thank God for the
simulators; if there was one thing Kyle didn’t like, it was flying blind, even
when he had his radar to point out incoming bogeys or crash hazards. Thanks to
the simulations, though, he’d had a chance to get used to flying through this
seemingly impenetrable haze.

“Seven Alpha
to Squadron Seven,” Teterev said over the radio. “Clearing cloud cover in two
minutes.”

Sure enough,
two minutes after diving into the cloud cover, Emily and Kyle broke through,
and they got their first in-person view of the surface of Menar.

It was
daytime on Menar, he knew that much, but aside from a few pillars of sunlight
piercing the black canopy, it was dark. Wisps of God knew what kind of gases
and pollution danced in those rare sunbeams, vaguely illuminating the
landscape. The whole planet just had a rotting, sinister look about it. Like
something out of a bootlegged horror movie he might’ve watched as a kid.

As they
descended to lower altitudes and the landscape became clearer, it was even more
horrific. Massive, gaping black craters. Vegetation that was dead or close to
it. Charred, skeletal remains of small clusters of whatever Menarians
considered to be civilization.

Just like in
the simulators but still somehow jarring.

“I can
definitely see why they want a piece of Earth,” Emily said.

“Yeah. Me
too.” Kyle flashed her a grin. “Ready to give them a piece of Earth?”

She grinned
back. “Absolutely.”

“Hey, Seven
Foxtrot.” Dezhnyov’s voice was tinny over the radio. “You two ready to meet the
Menarians in their own backyard?”

“Ready,
Seven Alpha.” Kyle loosened and tightened his grasp on the control stick. “Been
waiting my whole life for this.”

“Good,”
Teterev said. “Estimated contact in sixty seconds.”

“First wave
has confirmed the city’s defenses are neutralized,” Dezhnyov said. “Roll in
fast. We need to get to that launch pad before the cargo ship gets too high.”

“Keep an eye
out for bogeys,” Teterev said. “They’ll be sending reinforcements if they
haven’t already.”

“Tell ’em to
bring it on,” Emily said. “I’m ready for them.”

“Good,”
Dezhnyov replied, “because there they are.”

As if on
cue, half a dozen Menarian fighters appeared out of nowhere, flying in a tight
wedge formation.

The
Menarians scattered. Kyle chased two away from the group, and then let them get
behind him. He led them toward the city, closing the distance between himself
and the cargo ship even while he was taking out the two defenders.

Kyle
immediately liked playing offense instead of defense. Whenever the Menarians
attacked on Earth, there was always a bit of panic, a feeling of being caught
off guard even when they had some warning. This time, there was none of that
because it was the Menarians who were being caught off guard. They might have
known the landscape better than he did, but he didn’t give a damn if a stray
missile damaged that landscape or took out a structure.

Near the
central part of the city, he used the tall buildings and gaps between them to
his advantage, swooping through the narrow spaces and making tight circles
around the structures to throw off his pursuers. He banked hard to the left,
slipped between the two structures, and then made a hard right. One Menarian on
their tail made it between the structures, but it didn’t make that hard right
as cleanly as it needed to. A shower of sparks, a ball of fire, and that was
one bogey down and one structure compromised.

The second,
however, was tougher to elude.

Kyle zigged.
So did the Menarian.

He zagged.
So did the Menarian.

“Damn it,
this guy’s good,” he muttered.

Such was the
problem with a war that had gone on for so fucking long. Both sides adapted to
each other until their fighting was similar in both strategy and ability. The
boxer fighting the same opponent over and over learned to anticipate both
attacks and defenses, memorized weaknesses and strengths. The alien fighter
pilot accustomed to a human’s maneuvers learned to anticipate them, as well.

“Can you get
on top of him?” Emily asked.

“Give me a
second . . . Okay, ready?”

“When you
are.”

They both
braced, and Kyle dived hard. The fighter went straight down, then inverted and
started coming back up. The g-forces were tremendous, but he gritted his teeth
and kept the throttle and control stick forward until the bird leveled out
again.

The other
fighter either hadn’t predicted the move, or hadn’t been able to copy it, and
as Kyle’s fighter completed its loop, they came straight down toward the
Menarian’s canopy.

“I got him,”
Emily said, and a split second later, the fighter jolted as a missile launched.

The Menarian
tried to evade, but the shot slammed into it. The explosion lit up the dark sky
and metal buildings, raining fiery debris onto the streets below.

“Nice!” Kyle
said. “Your first hit on Menar.”

“First of
many,” she said with a grin. “Now we— Shit, we’ve got two on our six.”

Out of
nowhere, a missile collided with one of the Menarian fighters.

“Make that
one on your six,” Dezhnyov’s sharply accented voice said over the radio.
Another explosion, and the second was gone. “You’re welcome, Foxtrot.”

“That’s
because my thumb was still on the button,” Emily said. “That was for your ears,
Dezhnyov. We’ll finish this at home.”

“I like
her,” Teterev broke in.

“Traitor,”
Dezhnyov muttered.

Lori A. Witt is the fourth corner
of the Gallagher-Witt quad, and prefers to play in the genres of science
fiction and fantasy over all that romance nonsense. Okay, so romance does show
up sometimes, but these are the books she writes when she needs a change of
pace. Sword and sorcery, spaceships, and just general weird nerdy goodness—Lori
writes it all. Like the other members of the quad (L.A. Witt, Lauren Gallagher,
and Ann Gallagher),
Lori is in the process of relocating from Omahabad, Nebraskastan to the
southwestern coast of Spain. In her spare time, she tries to stay out of the
middle of L.A.’s and Lauren’s ongoing rivalry, while never missing a chance to
trip Ann when she’s not paying attention.

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